- One year (9/2014 - 9/2015).
- Five cites (Mountain View, Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Jose, San Francisco).
- Total of seventy stations.
- 354152 bike trips.
September, 2016
Bay area bike share
How it works
- 24 hour or 3 day passes can be bought at a station kiosk.
- 1 year subscriptions available online. 88 per cent of trips are by subscribers.
- Bikes can be hired and dropped off at any station.
- Users can make as many 30 minute trips as they like. Longer trips incur late fees. ($4 for 30-60 minute trip, $7 each additional 30 minutes.)
People love it!
- On average over 1200 trips per day are made during the week.
- Over 360 per day are made on weekends.
- Usage drops around January. It drops by 30 per cent on rainy days.
Holidays
- Usage drops on holidays. Note Independence day fell on a saturday so was observed on friday the 3rd.
Trip length
- The average trip length is 17.43 minutes, 1.35 km.
- 95.5% of trips are made within the 30 minute time limit.
Long trips
- The longest trip made lasted 200 days! ($67153 late fees…)
- The largest distance between stations was 68 km, from San Jose to San Francisco, a trip of more than 8 hours:
Trip time: Weekday
Trip time: Weekend
Typical weekday (Use controls to zoom.)
Expansion!
- The bike share is expanding ten-fold to 7000 bikes with new stations.
- Users can submit suggestions for locations online. Over 5000 so far:
- People are clearly enthusiastic, great! But how to choose?
Usage data
- We'll look at the data, analyse usage patterns and suggest locations.
- The data is available here.
Busiest stations
- We will use a graph ranking algorithm to find the busiest stations.
- Bike stations are nodes, links between nodes represent trips.
- Weights on the links give the number of trips.
Eigenvalue centrality
- Takes into account the number of links made by a node but also their quality (do they connect to busy stations?).
- The higher the centrality value the more important the station.
- We calculated eigenvalue centrality on a city by city basis.
Mountain View
Palo Alto
Redwood City
San Francisco
San Jose
Number 1 in each city:
- Mountain View: Mountain View Caltrain station.
- Palo Alto: Palo Alto Caltrain station.
- Redwood City: Redwood City Caltrain station.
- San Francisco: San Francisco Caltrain (Townsend at 4th).
- San Jose: San Jose Diridon Caltrain station.
Caltrain stations
- We see that the busiest locations in each city are at the Caltrain stations.
San Francisco Caltrain
- 95 per cent of usage here is long term subscribers. There are two stations.
- Bikes are picked up in the morning, dropped off in the evening by commuters.
Zip codes of commuters to SF Caltrain
- People travel from all over (780 zip codes). Top 80 account for 92 per cent:
Expansion
- Part of the planned expansion of the system is to have stations in Oakland, Emeryville and Berkeley.
- Integrating with the Bay area rapid transit stations and other public transport will encourage commuters to use the bikes.
Expansion
- There are already 35910 trips made from users who live here.
SF open data
- The City and County of San Francisco has measured bicycle usage.
- They have records going back to 2006 at various locations around the city.
- The data is available here.
- We'll take a look to see if we can get an idea of where bicycles are being used.
Bike usage has generally increased
- Each line represents a location throughout the city.
Visualise where cycling is popular
High usage
- Cycling common in Marina District, Lower Haight and Mission District.
- The Golden gate bridge is popular too. According to San Francisco wikitravel: A very popular ride for visitors to San Francisco is the ride across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.
Recreation
- Also note recreational areas like the park are also popular.
- TripAdvisor will give us the tourist hot spots:
- We see many are not catered for by BABS. Expansion into these areas may encourage more leisure, weekend use.
Imbalance
- If more cycles are hired than deposited from a station then the station will require manual re-stocking.
- If less cycles are hired than deposited the station fills up and depositing a bike can be frustrating.
Availability at S.F. Caltrain (Townsend at 4th)
- We see that during peak hours it can be a problem.
Daily imbalance
- We calculate the daily average deposits minus hires at each station:
Imbalance in San Francisco
Increasing the size of these stations will help alleviate system disruption:
| Station | Mean daily imbalance |
|---|---|
| San Francisco Caltrain (Townsend at 4th) | 23 |
| Grant Avenue at Columbus Avenue | -11 |
| 2nd at Folsom | -9 |
| Market at Sansome | 7 |
| Powell at Post (Union Square) | -7 |
| Station | Mean daily imbalance |
|---|---|
| Beale at Market | -6 |
| Market at 10th | -5 |
| 2nd at Townsend | 4 |
| Temporary Transbay Terminal (Howard at Beale) | -4 |
| Townsend at 7th | 4 |
Conclusion and recommendations
- The BABS system is popular with commuters.
- Peak usage is during typical commuting hours.
- Usage drops on rainy days and holidays.
- The busiest stations are located at transport hubs like Caltrain stations.
- Expansion to new cities should be along existing public transport infrastructure.
- Within San Francisco cycling is already popular in Marina District, along the 101, in Lower Haight and Mission District. Bike stations here will be welcome.
- Increasing the size of the most imbalanced stations will help mitigate any disruption to users caused by lack of space or bikes.
Conclusion and recommendations
- Recreational areas like the parks are currently popular with cyclists but not catered for by BABS. Bike stations in these locations will promote the BABS as a leisure activity.
- Promotion to tourists as a travel option would help too: There is currently no mention of BABS on San Francisco wikitravel or Bay area wikitravel.
- There is some confusion about how the system works, some users don't seem to understand the 30 minute rule (or don't care!).
Happy cycling!
